The creation and performance of music has evolved greatly throughout history. For centuries prior to the 1900s, music performance consisted of live performances of improvised or composed compositions. Even with composed compositions, the nature of “live” performance was such that a piece of music was never performed quite the same way twice. Beginning in the early part of the twentieth century, as recording technology began to be developed, the fundamentals of music performance began to change as it became possible to capture a particular performance in a recorded medium and re-play it remotely at a separated instance in time. While live music performances continue to take place, playback of a particular captured audio content selection has been the state of the art in sharing music performances for a number of decades, even though the media on which the music selections are captured, distributed, and rendered has changed over time. In more recent years, music performance has evolved once again as the wide-spread digital distribution of music has made it possible for a single captured, rendered piece of music to be shared with, literally, millions of people.
While recorded music selections and the wide-spread distribution thereof have revolutionized the music industry in many positive ways, a some-what unfortunate side effect has been the loss of the unpredictability, fluidity, and dynamic nature of live performance. Recorded music selections are static and predictable and, as such, even the most avid recorded music consumers often seek the experience of a live performance through other channels.
Recorded music is currently commercially distributed in a linear form via analog cassette tapes, vinyl analog copies, audio CDs and more recently, via digital distribution of music by consumers and owners who trade and/or sell MP3/WMA/AAC compressed digital audio files. However, the music renditions being distributed through any of these media are fixed, once-rendered and captured audio performances that are played the same way each and every time they are played on a particular audio playing device.
Additionally, even though musicians working in a studio often record multiple “takes” of the same part, only one of those parts is produced and included in a particular rendition of the piece of music. For instance, a guitarist may record fifteen different guitar solos for the same song but, in the end, a producer chooses one of these fifteen, and the rest are discarded, even though twelve out of the fifteen may be interesting, valid, and musically useful takes. As such, in the end, the music rendition that is produced is a fixed and captured performance that again, plays the same way each and every time it is played on a particular audio playing device.
It should be noted that it is possible to dynamically “remix” music performances to create unique performances by combining one or more linear tracks from CDs or vinyl records or sampling devices. However, significant user-interaction is required to change a performance, the various music components and elements thereof being altered independently to create each performance. While mixing boards, complex stereo equipment, professional music authoring software and the like which permit this type of music rendering have appeal to dance club DJs and particularly astute non-DJ consumers, they are not easily useable for the average consumer. Additionally, if no user input is provided other than initiation of play, the settings on the mixing board and/or stereo equipment will remain the same and the rendered music performance will be the same each and every time it is played.
Accordingly, an audio content playing device for initiating play of dynamically rendered audio content selections that are rarely, if ever, played the same way twice would be advantageous. Additionally, an audio content playing device on which play of dynamically rendered audio content selections with little input and/or decision making on the part of the user would be desirable.